“We are not looking at cutting any other sports at this time,” Dean of Students Tina Hoxie said as she reflected Tuesday on the school’s 80 years of football history.

The school is putting together a transition team of advisers and counselors to assist football players as they decide whether to stay and graduate or transfer to another school to compete. An assistant coach will stay on to run a spring conditioning program to help prepare those who plan to transfer to play at another school.

Faculty union President Frederick van Hartesveldt III said he couldn’t get over the lack of communication involved with the decision. The same concern has reverberated among the school’s faculty as members wondered how the decades-old program could dissolve so quickly, he said.

The answer, administrators said, was in finances.

The Raiders finished this season undefeated with an 11-0 record and won the Midwest Football Conference. Still, the program’s cost has continued to grow.

Records show the team’s expenses in the 2010-11 academic year totaled about $237,300 — significantly more than the school’s other athletic teams. Expenses for the men’s and women’s basketball teams combined were less than half of that in the same year, at about $106,800.

Hoxie said football accounted for about 40 percent of the school’s estimated $600,000 athletics budget. The annual football operating budget is about $250,000, she said.

As the only remaining junior college football team in Michigan, travel expenses would only continue to grow, she said, as players travel as far away as Georgia for games. This season, the football team logged about 5,000 miles of travel.

Still, van Hartesveldt said he wishes there was a discussion about other ways to cut costs. He questioned whether the program may have been scaled back or pared down instead.

“Internally, we never had the chance to talk about it,” he said. “To cut a program without involving the people closest to it, to me, is wrong.”

Mike Hansen, president of the Michigan Association of Community Colleges, said schools across the state have different approaches when it comes to athletics. Some, such as Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, offer no sports, other than intramural competition.

The crux of the issue is the financial strains athletics can place on an institution, Hansen said. It isn’t that some schools value programs any more or less, but rather how athletics fit into the overall budget.

Community college teams face challenges that larger college teams don’t deal with as extensively, Hansen said. Community colleges have a higher percentage of middle-aged, nontraditional students and those who take classes part time, whereas four-year schools have a larger number of full-time post-high school graduates.

“The structure is probably not as conducive to some of the sports programs at a university,” he said.

But that is not to say athletics still don’t play a valuable role in student life, Hansen said. It is more a matter of looking at cost effectiveness, a question every school faces.

At Lansing Community College, Athletic Director Scott Latham said the school has nine teams and will continue to budget for them in the next academic year.

“We’re not looking to add any, we’re not looking to cut any,” he said.

Marty McDermott, president of the Michigan Community Colleges Athletics Association, said he has watched as every school has evaluated and scrutinized the value in the athletic and other programs they offer, from academics to student life.

While athletics come at a cost to any school, he said, they also serve as a recruiting tool, keeping students engaged in campus life until graduation.

That’s the feeling GRCC running back Jayshon Jackson had as he explained the helplessness he felt on Tuesday, realizing his football career had ended. He attended GRCC for that reason: to take classes, but also to play.

“It’s just a bad situation for us as players and for the coaches,” Jackson said. “I know they feel bad because they don’t have any say-so in it, either. It’s the school. It hurts, but what can we do? We’re only the players.”